The nitty-gritty of killing off WMDs

To rid the world of bioweapons and nukes, we must accept paradoxes and understand the complexities of the technology, argue two fascinatingly forensic books

IT is called Fogbank and it is a type of foam – toxic, explosive and highly flammable, and vital to the W76 nuclear warheads on Trident missiles. But the US government forgot how to make it. Over the nine years to 2009, the US National Nuclear Security Administration spent &dollar;69 million trying to remember how. A previous plant had been dismantled, few records had been kept and staff had left. The wheel simply had to be reinvented.

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Her fascinating book, Barriers to Bioweapons, also shows that anyone wanting to develop biological weapons faces a raft of other difficulties. Of the five main bioweapons programmes to date, their key feature has been their failures, not their successes. In a forensic and compelling analysis, she describes how the Soviet Union, the US, South Africa and the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo, all fell well short, despite spending billions of dollars over decades.

Then there’s Iraq, where the government spent &dollar;80 million over 20 years on bombs that its scientists knew would not deliver most of the anthrax and other toxins they contained, but simply destroy them on impact.

The living microorganisms at the heart of these programmes are fragile and unpredictable, and the main barrier to producing bioweapons isn’t access to materials and technologies, but the practical and organisational difficulties of actually getting devices to work. These weaknesses should be exploited to stem bioweapons development, she says. Present policy, stressing how easy it is to make bioweapons, only encourages terrorists.

“Present policy, stressing how easy it is to make bioweapons, only encourages terrorists”

The approach taken by the authors of Unmaking the Bomb is different, and for good reasons. They argue that the way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to control the fissile materials that cause the explosions.

To back up their argument, they give a succinct, authoritative account of all the fissile material produced in military and civilian nuclear programmes since 1945. They conclude that, as at the end of 2013, there were about 1400 tonnes of highly enriched uranium and 500 tonnes of separated plutonium – together enough for more than 100,000 nuclear weapons.

Most of this material went into nuclear weapons programmes, mostly in Russia and the US. Some powered submarines, while plutonium separated from electricity-producing reactors was being stockpiled in Russia, the UK and France.

To ensure nuclear disarmament, the authors argue, all these materials have to be eliminated, using something like the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty proposed by the UN in 1993. Since civil nuclear technology can be used to make bombs, they write, “it might be necessary for the world to do without nuclear power altogether”.

Along with Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, they have another suggestion. International law should make working on nuclear or biological weapons a crime against humanity, thereby helping scientists and engineers exercise their consciences.

This is the kind of moral force that succeeded in ridding the world of slavery in previous centuries. These authors remind us, however, that the nuclear dangers we face are immediate, and that time is not on the side of humanity.